Children as young as 7 are now being forced to join Vladimir Putin’s dystopian drone war, which rained down attacks on Kyiv on Thursday that left 23 people dead, including four kids.
The 7-year-olds are not directly involved in the war in Ukraine, but in a chilling escalation, they will be trained as future drone pilots as part of their education in school from next year. And then, starting in ninth grade, children are being actively recruited to work in a drone factory that is part of a college where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are sent to kill civilians in Ukraine are being manufactured.
Conditions are brutal in the drone factory at Alabuga college, 600 miles west of Moscow, with allegations of bullying and physical abuse. One of the young workers, who asked to be called Kate, told the Daily Beast that she was being reprogrammed into an “unbreakable” part of Putin’s war machine.
“No weak students could survive the Alabuga college training, only the strongest ones, who do not break,” she said.
One of the college’s best students has died by suicide. His name was Denis and he was 17 years old. Authorities said he was from the small town of Kushva in the Sverdlovsk region, but his last name remains classified.
His death prompted an outpouring of anger from parents, according to posts on Russian social media, who complained that it is “Hell for children” at the factory. “Students are not considered humans there,” one parent reportedly added.
The impact of their work is often shielded from them but reports on the devastating attacks on civilians in Ukraine do leak through via social media and some news reports. On Thursday morning, Russia attacked Ukraine with 598 drones and 31 ballistic missiles. Once again, the Ukrainian capital was on fire, with several buildings, including a five-story apartment building, offices of the British Council, and the European mission going up in flames. The number of Ukrainian children killed in Russia continues to rise. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission of Ukraine reported that 222 kids were killed in March of this year alone.
The Kremlin is working hard to draw more children into the war effort back home. Kids at the remote college-factory are making more than $700 a month, which is huge money for a Russian teen. An promoting Alabuga college also seems to promise another inducement for kids as young as 15. In the video, a robot girl with large breasts whispers to a teen worker in a seductive tone: “Program me…”
Sergei Krasnov, 13, from Russia’s Ivanovo region, told the Daily Beast that he would be happy to build drones and make his own money. “Drones will replace people, it’s better drones die and not people— they build fighter drones in France and in Germany too,” he said.
A St. Petersburg-based politician, Boris Vishnevsky, told the Daily Beast that most Russian parents would want to send their teenagers to Alabuga college to build drones not only for a good salary, but “out of patriotism.”
The war effort begins even younger. Putin has lowered the age for children’s participation in learning how to pilot drones from 10 to 7, taking the war into the classroom at an ever-younger age. Russia also uses drones to locate forest fires and deliver goods. Starting from Aug. 1, the authorities allocated a separate airspace for drones.
Putin said drone piloting had to become a part of the school program to teach children “to pilot, assemble and construct drones.”
“I am convinced that it will make the kids busy with something useful and interesting, distract them from things they should not be doing,” he explained.
Russia is locked in a drone standoff with Ukraine. Iryna Terech, CTO of leading Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point, said there is “a race of deep-strike drone manufacture.”
“We are working to scale up production from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of units,” Terech told the Daily Beast.
Obviously, there is therefore a short-term pressure for additional Russian drone manufacturing, but there is simultaneously a huge lack of basic domestic technology in any number of sectors, including passenger aircraft.
So, why is there so much Kremlin focus on drones?
According to the man running this new drone program, it is even more ideological than simply preparing children for war. Asked why he was now moving into drone manufacturing, Timur Zhagivaleev, director of the Alabuga economic zone, told Zvezda, a propaganda television network run by the Ministry of Defense: “In our opinion, crazy people took power under Biden in the United States, they promote their woke culture, the woke virus.”
The Kremlin’s answer is to induct its kids into war.
While the “war on woke” has become a common right-wing talking point in the U.S., it is totally meaningless to the average Russian family.
“Honestly, I have no idea what woke means and I don’t think that even 1 percent of Russians know it,” Svetlana, a Moscow events manager, told the Daily Beast. Her name has been changed. “I had to look it up—it’s something that Elon Musk said had killed his son, but I am still not sure how.”
Yelena Panfilova, a Moscow-based reporter for the respected Novaya Gazeta newspaper, told the Daily Beast that she heard a lot about the woke culture while reporting on a Russian conservative conference, which recently hosted Musk’s father, Errol Musk.
“Maybe not many Russians know where Alabuga is and even fewer understand the meaning of the woke culture, but every Moscovite recently received an invitation for the Mayor’s Cup to watch drone racing at a city festival this week,” she said, explaining that drone engineering and piloting are becoming part of Russia’s popular culture.
On the other side of the frontline, the idea that drones bombarding their homes and offices has anything to do with the war on woke sounds even more ludicrous. “The entire idea of killing Ukrainians out of hate for the woke culture is comically ridiculous,” said Sevgil Musayeva, the editor-in-chief of the country’s leading newspaper, Ukrainska Pravda.
One of the explosions on Thursday morning shattered the windows in her Kyiv newsroom at 5:40 a.m. local time; luckily, none of the reporters were sleeping there on the night of the attacks, as they often do.
“That night was a horrific nightmare,” she said. “Putin is sending a message to Trump and the EU: ‘I don’t respect you.’”
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